During the regular course of using electronic and networked assets of an enterprise, a user may often experience a wide spectrum of satisfaction with using those assets.
The need to gauge end-user experiences in a distributed, service-oriented environment is very important. Companies like banks and retail chains have a challenge to coordinate availability and performance of systems and information across multiple branch sites and remote locations. There is a need to identify these problems and pinpoint issues proactively.
Most enterprises have mechanisms to determine response times of interactions with users between the users and the sites of the enterprises. However, the ability to gather metrics below the site level to the individual services and even operations within services is grossly lacking.
As a result, true problems that may exist can go undetected for quite some time. This means the enterprise could potentially lose many customers before the situation is properly remedied. These lost customers may never return to the enterprise.
Consequently, it is readily apparent that the ability to efficiently, accurately, and timely gauge performance below the site level of an enterprise is of vital importance to an enterprise.
Moreover, it is not just the potential of losing customers that is important to an enterprise. For example, pricing levels with customers can be based on performance metrics associated with pre-established Service-Level Agreements (SLA's) or End-User Performance (EUP) metrics. So, an enterprise may not be getting the income it rightfully deserves and may not have any valid mechanism for determining what a fair and proper pricing-level should be with a customer because the metrics are unreliable and in many cases unattainable with existing approaches.
Thus, improved techniques for measuring the performance of enterprise services are needed.